The Kylver Rune Stone, from the 400s, featuring an early complete FUTHARK sequence, followed by what appears to be a bindrune of t-runes, and the mystery inscription SUEUS

Runes are the native script of speakers of ancient Germanic languages, a family of languages that includes English, German, Danish, Icelandic, Dutch, Gothic, Yiddish, and many others. The first runic inscriptions appear on record around the first century CE. The oldest form of the runes is today typically referred to as the Elder Futhark. (If you’re new to the formal study of runes, runology, here’s a great introduction from the celebrated runologist Klaus Düwel (2004) and another from the excellent runologist Tineke Looijenga (2020).)

Just like English’s contemporary Latin-derived alphabet, runes represent phonemes, sounds, and stringing them together yields words and sentences. However, unlike the archaic Greek scripts (the most recent identifiable ancestor of the runic script), each rune had a name meaningful to early Germanic-speaking society. In turn, as we see on runic inscriptions like the Stentoften runestone (Denmark) and later on for example on Old English and Old Icelandic manuscripts, runes not only represented a sound but also were at times used to stand in for their names (Begriffsrunen ‘ideograph runes’). We know these names primarily (but not entirely) from several rune poem specimens, alliterative verse compositions creatively focused on the runes and their names. It is from my translations of these poems published by Hyldr that this supplement derives (see The Icelandic & Swedish Rune Poems, 2023, and The Danish & Norwegian Rune Poems, 2024).

The matter of the early rune names has long been a major point of interest for runologists, as has the unique order of the runes, which we see in not only the rune poems but also on inscriptions. Unlike most other scripts descending from archaic Greek scripts, the runes have a particular order known as the FUTHARK. This strange-looking name comes from its first six letters (the voiced fricative phoneme represented in English as TH is represented by a single rune).

The initial FUTHARK order more or less stays with the script up until this very day, a period of over 2,000 years. We’ve based the order of the Elder Futhark sequence below on an Elder Futhark inscription found on what we know today as the KylverRunestone (above). Dating to the 400s and found on the island of Gotland in Sweden, this runestone features a FUTHARK sequence containing all 24 Elder Futhark runes. It reads as follows:

futharkgwhnijpïzstbemlŋdo

The inscriber follows this with a tree-like symbol that seems be a bindrune of repeated t-runes. Similar bindrune-like, tree-like symbols are found as a part of some other inscriptions, like the Seeland II-C bracteate (Denmark) and the Malt runestone (Denmark). In addition to the FUTHARK sequence and the tree-like symbol is an inscription reading sueus, a palindrome of unknown meaning. Interestingly, the stone was found face-down on a grave.

The Vadstena C-braceate (below) from around the same time and also from Sweden shows a slight difference in order when compared to the Kylver inscription above: the two the o-rune and d-rune have swapped placed. Notably, it also divides them with colons into three sections of eight:

futharkgw : hnijïpzs : tbemlŋod

These divisions are known today as the ættir (Old Norse ‘families’, singular ætt). The number three has a particular emphasis in later Germanic-speaking cultures, such as among speakers of Old English and Old Norse, and especially when it is multiplied by itself, producing the important number nine (for more on this see for example discussion from Hopkins (2020) here).

All of the below rune names are in Proto-Germanic, the (mostly reconstructed) ancestor of all Germanic languages. The asterisk (*) indicates that a word is not directly attested but has instead been reconstructed based on its descendants, a process known among historical linguists as the comparative method. Some of these reconstructions are therefore on firmer grounds than others, dependent entirely on the quantity and quality of the data from which the reconstruction is based.